[JuniperMesos]

The actual reason this matters is because of the implications it has for race-based affirmative action programs in cognitively-demanding fields; i.e. "why are there visibly no black people and lots of Asians in this advanced math class, and what should we do to fix the problem?"

There is no political agreement on whether having or not having affirmative action programs is racist (or against which racial groups).

[tptacek]

There are a huge number of assumptions, many of them quite dubious, encoded into the idea that this research is impactful to affirmative action.

Affirmative action might be problematic for totally unrelated reasons. Maybe there's no way to do it without being racist towards Asians, or without selecting a tiny privileged cohort of Black families to accrue benefits on (simply "applying for college" in the first place situates most people in a position of privilege).

We absolutely do not know enough about the psychometric science here --- forget race entirely and just try to pick through theories of intelligence and its mutability --- to make public policy decisions. It is, at present, a pure scientific concern.